Full Bush Question and Comment

Before anyone complains that I am being too anti-Bush by posting the op ed peice from Arab News, below is the entire question and answer that contained the president's comment that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

You can read it a couple of ways. One way would be that the President is not saying here (or, by implication, anywhere else), that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 but that he was concerned about "preventing threats before they materialized." Or, you could say that the President's rhetoric has Iraq so wrapped up with 9/11 and Al-Qaeda that it is hard to separate them.
(I suppose another point you could make is that he doesn't answer the question.)

You be the judge.




White House Press Conference, Aug 21 2006
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060821.html

Q Quick follow-up. A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn't gone in. How do you square all of that?

THE PRESIDENT: I square it because, imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would -- who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East.

Now, look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was -- the main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question -- my answer to your question is, is that, imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

You know, I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of "we're going to stir up the hornet's nest" theory. It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

THE PRESIDENT: Nothing, except for it's part of -- and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a -- the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective. I have made that case.

And one way to defeat that -- defeat resentment is with hope. And the best way to do hope is through a form of government. Now, I said going into Iraq that we've got to take these threats seriously before they fully materialize. I saw a threat. I fully believe it was the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein, and I fully believe the world is better off without him. Now, the question is how do we succeed in Iraq? And you don't succeed by leaving before the mission is complete, like some in this political process are suggesting.

Arab Point of View

Here is an opinion piece from Arab News that I find interesting not just for its anti-Bush point of view (which is to be expected), but for the depth of its argument. The criticisms here are better thought out than most American Op Ed pieces and more reasonable than many of President Bush's domestic critics.
Click Here For Original Article

Finally, Bush Admits Something We Already Know
Angelo Young, Arab News

President George Bush made a confession at last week’s press conference with the Beltway journalists. He admitted clearly that Iraq had “nothing” to do with the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center:

Q: What did Iraq have to do with that?

The president: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q: The attack on the World Trade Center?

The president: Nothing, except for it’s part of — and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.

The “truthiness” of W’s statement may depend on one’s interpretation of the word “suggested”.

In the years since 9/11, the Bush administration on numerous occasions consciously and misleadingly created a “Nexus of Evil” comprising Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and ominous, cinematic images of anthrax-spewing remote-control airplanes flying over Texas Tudor tract housing in red-state suburbia.

This suggested Saddam-9/11 link was so strong that polling in the run-up to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq had a majority of Americans believing something that has never been found to be true — and probably never will be.

A July 2003 poll by PIPA Knowledge Networks put 70 percent of the American public believing that Saddam orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks. Two years later, the Harris Interactive polling group showed that 47 percent of Americans still had this false assumption. The administration has never made an effort to clarify this falsehood.

The list of attempts to “suggest” an Iraq-9/11 link began soon after the attacks in New York.

In a Dec. 9, 2001 interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Vice President Dick Cheney floated the idea that a report “pretty well confirmed” that a senior Iraqi security official met with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague in April 2001 prior to the attack on the World Trade Center.

On second thought, strike that.

Bush’s own CIA and FBI both agree, based on phone records and credit card receipts, that Atta was in Florida taking flight lessons at the time. The Iraqi security official in question, Ahmed Kalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, was later in US custody and told interrogators that he never met Atta.

In October 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bush stated the following: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons, and other plans — this time armed by Saddam Hussein.”

In a televised address in September 2003, Bush stated that, “Iraq has trained Al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.”

Also in September 2003, Cheney was on television saying that by ousting Saddam, America had “struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who’ve had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”

(Is it just me that wonders whether Bush realizes that when he calls his American loyalists “the base” of his presidency that in Arabic “the base” translates to “al-qaeda”?)

In January of that year, Cheney called the evidence of a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda “overwhelming”, citing Iraq’s harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Cheney conveniently left out that in 1998, Iraq offered to turn Yasin over to the FBI in exchange for a statement recognizing that Iraq played no role in that attack. The Clinton administration declined the offer.

Evidence also shows that less than six hours after the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was rallying his staff to find some link to the Iraqi dictator.

A memo obtained by the US media through the Freedom of Information Act shows that an aide to Rumsfeld had written down instructions from the defense secretary to obtain the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL ... Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” The initials refer to Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden.

The Iraq hawks in the US media, such as conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, were more than happy to disseminate the idea of Bush’s Nexus of Evil. “The absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence,” Safire sniffed at the anti-war crowd in his weekly column on May 19, 2004 (titled “Sarin? What Sarin?”). Indeed, he said, Iraqi nerve toxins had in fact been found: In a 20-year-old Howitzer shell, a fragment of the illegal weapons supplied by the West during the Iran-Iraq war.

Charles Duelfer, a former adviser to the director of the CIA’s Iraq weapons intelligence operations, pointed out that Saddam’s illicit weapons were decommissioned following the UN-sanctioned Gulf War. The UN, under the auspices of multilateral cooperation, destroyed nerve toxin stockpiles housed in these 155-millimeter artillery shells from 1992 to 1994.

The right-wing blowhards from the peanut gallery, such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity of Fox News, heralded the discovery of the shell as the smoking gun that legitimized all of Bush’s WMD claims. The “ah-ha-I-told-you-sos” only lasted a few weeks, however, after it became apparent that the discovery of the lone artillery shell wouldn’t lead to a massive underground stockpile of WMDs and a shadowy cabal of Muslim scientists plotting the downfall of Western civilization. The media’s Bush boosters simply moved on to bull-horning other conflations, misrepresentations and half-truths to the American public. (Aluminum tubes, anyone?)

Bush is a man who takes pride in his idée fix , his nuance-less, black-and-white view of the world. He often speaks in a generalist, “with us or against us” terms about issues that are — in the reality outside of his brain — very complicated.

This administration has clearly and consistently sought to find evidence to fit its vague objectives (i.e. “freedom to the Iraqi people”) rather than creating clear objectives that fit the evidence. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.

Meanwhile, the rest of us who know better are forced to takes sides in the false choices that Bush sets up. You’re either for his plan or you love terrorists. You either support the administration’s Middle East policy or you hate freedom. To anyone who hasn’t already been sold a bill of goods by the neocon Republican agenda, these types of statements are wide open for interpretation. (What is freedom? How does one hate it?)

Another telling aspect of Bush’s ambiguous, ignorant, disingenuous use of language emerged last week. Bush defined the US “strategy” in Iraq as: “To help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams.”

Helping the Iraqi people achieve their objective may be a lofty goal, but it’s not a strategy. A strategy is how one achieves a goal. If the president is so intellectually incapable of distinguishing “strategy” from “goal”, then it’s not a leap of faith to cast doubt on any of the president’s assertions.

The belief that nobody in his administration ever attempted to make a 9/11-Iraq link could only be believed by the most blindly loyal of Bush’s American constituents; his “base” as he has been known to call them: His al-qaeda.

Bush’s latest denial is just the latest of Bush’s many treacherous denials of reality.

Islamic Fascism?

The new turn of phrase from the Bush administration is to label the enemy in the Global War on Terror as Islamic fascists. Does this make sense?

I went to an old class handout on fascism and got the following list of characteristics of fascism:

Irrationalism: people are not rational, need to be led

Social Darwinism: different groups of people are engaged in struggle for survival

Nationalism: individual identifies completely with society, one small part of whole

Glorification of the State: state is vehicle for aspirations of nation/race

Leadership Principle: hierarchy of absolute, totalitarian leadership

Anti-communism: And anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, anti-modernism

Racism: central component of National Socialism, not necessarily of fascism

Looking at Al-Qaida, we can see that we have matches with Irrationalism, Totalitarianism and anti-Rationalism/Modernism. The Nationalism and Glorification of the State are obviously different in that Al-Qaida is trying to usurp nationalism and replace it with commitment to Islam. Of course, that is what would make it Islamic fascism. So the label is not too far off the mark for Al-Qaida.

But does this mean it is a good idea to use it? Clearly, it is meant to trigger the negative feelings Americans and Europeans have for fascists and dovetail with assertions that the Global War on Terror is a struggle on the order of WWII. It is also probably meant to draw a distinction between Muslims as a whole and the Muslims the US is fighting.

Will this distinction translate well into Arabic or will the rhetorical shift from fighting "Terrorists" to "Islamic fascists" (after a brief flirtation with the term "War with Radical Islam") only deepen the impression among Muslims that the US is at war with their religion and culture?

Back to Blogging

I neglected this after setting it up in January. Well, time to get back to it.

A couple of days ago, Bernanke, the Fed Chief, addressed the meeting of economists at Jackson Hole. His comments are summed up at http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060825/bs_nm/economy_bernanke_dc